life's not a paragraph

1 oz GrandTen Wire Works Gin
1 oz Privateer Silver Rum
3/4 oz Dry Vermouth (Noilly Prat)
1/4 oz Velvet Falernum

Stir with ice, strain into a cocktail coupe pre-rinsed with apricot liqueur (1/3 bsp Rothman & Winter), and garnish with an orange twist.

Two Fridays ago, GrandTen Distillery announced its "Collab Cocktail Contest" in conjunction with the Massachusetts Distillers Alliance. They were seeking a cocktail using two or more Massachusetts distilled products with one of them being from GrandTen. Since I played a role in guiding the flavor profile of GrandTen's Wire Works Gin, that made for an obvious choice. I ended up choosing Privateer's Silver Rum as the other Massachusetts spirit, and I took things in a split base Georgetown Club direction. For a little extra panache, I added in a bell-ringer -- James Maloney's apricot liqueur rinse that was his signature move in his 1900 The Twentieth-Century Cocktail Guide for Mixing Fancy Drinks such as in his Martinez Bell-Ringer.
For a name, I wanted to pay tribute to a local writer, and e.e. cummings grew up around a mile from our house on 104 Irving Street in Cambridge. One of his poems that speaks to me during this time is "since feeling is first" which has the line "for life's not a paragraph/and death i think is no parenthesis"; therefore, I dubbed this one the Life's Not a Paragraph. This Martini riff began with an orange, apricot, and pine aroma. Next, white wine and a hint of orchard fruit on the sip transitioned into juniper, clove, lime, ginger, and apricot flavors on the swallow.